Tag: The University of Melbourne

The full program for the free one-day symposium Academia and Bohemia: new perspectives on the National Gallery School, including abstracts and biographies, is now available via the VCA events website. Date: Wednesday 21 June 2017. Venue: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Grant Street, Southbank.

A public forum with Bijoy Jain, Sean Godsell and Robert Grace. Moderated by Professor Philip Goad, Melbourne School of Design. On the eve of the launch of MPavilion 2016, hear three distinguished architects discuss the contemporary pavilion and its significance for audiences today. The speakers at this public forum have all experimented with the idea of the pavilion: Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai is the designer of the 2016 MPavilion; Sean Godsell of Sean Godsell Architects designed the 2014 MPavilion; and Robert Grace, of Robert Grace Architecture, designed the Garden Room at Woodchester House in 2011. This public conversation on the meaning of the Pavilion will be moderated by Professor Philip Goad, of the Melbourne Design School. Monday 3 October 2016, 6:15pm-7:15pm. Venue: Basement Theatre (B117), Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Parkville. Free event but booking essential via…

To mark of the launch of the 2016 MPavilion, the University of Melbourne is hosting a symposium that brings together leading architects, artists, curators, architectural historians, cultural historians and art historians to focus on the theme of ‘The Pavilion’, an architectural structure with an ancient lineage and continuing contemporary resonance. Experts from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will provide different perspectives on the ‘The Pavilion’ over three sessions. The first session—held at the University’s Melbourne School of Design—will include art historians and cultural historians; the second and third sessions—held at the VCA—will include architects, architectural historians and art historians, and artists and curators respectively. Tuesday 4 October 2016, 10:00am-6:00pm. An outline of the three sessions is provided below and full details can be found on the Australian Institute of Art History website. This is a free event but places are…

In September 2006 the National Gallery of Victoria acquired at auction a remarkable painting by a virtually unknown artist: Christ Turning Out the Money Lenders, a work attributed by the auction house to a ‘Louis Duffy, 20th century’. This impressively large painting shows sixteen men dressed in c. 1940 business suits, gathered in tense confrontation in a modern-day retelling of the New Testament account of Christ expelling the money changers from the Temple. In Duffy’s composition, the Temple setting has been transmuted into a modern graveyard, and the money changers have morphed into mid-20th-century arms dealers trading munitions on the graves of the dead, the ultimate profit-and-loss indicators of their grim transactions. The subsequent arrival of Duffy’s painting in Melbourne in late 2006 sparked considerable debate about the meaning and significance of the gallery’s new acquisition. Examination of the painting’s…

Thursday, 14 July 2016 – 5:00pm to Friday, 15 July 2016 – 6:00pm, State Library of Victoria and Melbourne School of Design The DigitalGLAM symposium will bring together cultural institutions, historians, heritage practitioners, researchers and digital designers to discover new practices in digital media and cultural engagement. The event will include national and international keynote talks, and panels of presentations and discussions around four themes of Touring, Digital Frontiers, Immersive Experience, and Animating Archives. Issues under scrutiny include: The projection of collections and artefacts into physical places beyond the traditional institutional reach; New intersections between expert knowledge, curatorial practice and citizen-generated content; Pathways and approaches to the design and development of new technologies; Understanding and evaluating digital impacts and significance; Critical reflections on the shaping of new digital identities for GLAM institutions. Keynote speakers Professor Sarah Kenderdine, Professor at UNSW Art & Design…

A symposium on new perspectives on Italian and Australian Art History at the University next week, with a keynote by National Gallery of Australia Director Dr Gerard Vaughan. Full program for symposium is now available on the website (pdf link). Changing the National Gallery of Australia: re-thinking the installations | Dr Gerard Vaughan In late 2015, the Director of the National Gallery of Australia, Dr Gerard Vaughan announced: ‘We have commenced an ambitious project to transform the experience at the NGA. Every time you visit the Gallery there will be new discoveries as we constantly revitalise the galleries dedicated to the permanent collection.’ In this lecture, Dr Vaughan will provide a detailed account of the new rehang, which has included the relocation of the entire Australian collection downstairs. International art, including Jackson Pollock’s famous Blue Poles (1952), has now moved…

The University of Melbourne is running a Classics Summer School in January 2016. The course is open to anyone who wants to learn more about the ancient world over the summer break. This course offers five days of classes covering the social history of ancient Greece, architecture, philosophy and a practical workshop to develop your argumentation skills. Presenter Dr Christopher Gribbin, Honorary Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, has taught at the Summer School since 2002. Each course consists of five sessions between 4 and 8 January 2016. For full details download the flyer (Classics Summer School Flyer) or visit the website

The lecture addresses one of the most well-established and influential ideas about prehistoric (and specifically Paleolithic) pictorial representation, namely, the idea that their original makers and beholders did not take them and use them as pictures ‘in our sense’ but instead considered them to be the ‘things themselves’, that is, the objects depicted, such as bison and other animals. But how do we reconcile this idea, which has some anthropological justification, with the visible activity of mark-making and of ‘painterliness’–of making visible the process of making the picture? What is the nature of this pictorial ‘illusion’? The lecture evaluates past and recent discussions of this matter using the example of the earliest widely accepted examples of prehistoric depiction, drawn from the Aurignacian tradition in southwestern Europe and specifically from the Cave of Chauvet. Whitney Davis is Professor of History &…

The healing power of art made by Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples is the subject of a Symposium at The Dax Centre on 19 and 20 September. This is a new exploration of the significance of Aboriginal art. The symposium will address a range of urgent and relevant topics on Indigenous art including art as therapy, community art projects, the role of arts centres in healing and Australian Indigenous contemporary art practices. The inspiring two-day symposium titled Healing Ways: Art with Intent will be opened by Professor Ian Anderson, Foundation Chair of Indigenous Higher Education, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Director of Murrup Barak, University of Melbourne, and include three keynote addresses, 13 presentations, 25 speakers and an artists’ panel. The full program is available on the website. Keynote speakers include: Judy Atkinson, Emeritus Professor, Southern Cross University and author…

Feeling Exclusion: Emotional Strategies and Burdens of Religious Discrimination and Displacement in Early Modern Europe 29-31 May 2014, University of Melbourne Discrimination and exclusion have long been strategies used by authorities to maintain authority and control. Fundamental to the success of such strategies, and ultimately also to their removal, is the role of emotion. The aim of this symposium is to explore an important stage in the European history of exclusion between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a time when political and religious upheaval forced an unprecedented number of people to flee their homelands or to live in a state of internal exile. The symposium will focus on the use of emotions in the experience of exile and displacement, the stereotyping of the marginal and excluded, and conflicts over toleration. Venue: Graduate House 220 Leicester St. Carlton Registration: http://bit.ly/1mx8PPP Program: http://bit.ly/1j5gYro Enquiries: jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au Free…

Felicity Harley-McGowan ‘Being Blunt’: The art history ‘revolution’ in 1940s London In 1940, London was home to a thriving network of scholarly activity in the discipline of art history. Three books published in that year have been seen within their own fields of research to epitomise the radical transformation of the discipline in the English-speaking world across the 1930s and 1940s. Concerning aspects of classical, medieval and Renaissance art and intellectual culture, each was published by a leading institution (The Courtauld Institute, British Museum, and The Warburg Institute), and authored by now-celebrated scholars (Anthony Blunt, Ernst Kitzinger, and Jean Seznec). This paper will examine aspects of the innovative pedagogical and research ideas epitomised by the books collectively; and with reference to the current state of the discipline, will reflect on the ways in which each was a catalyst for…

2013 Margaret Manion Lecture by Associate Professor John Martyn This free public lecture will focus on an extraordinary illuminated manuscript – made up of forty one letters by Pope Gregory the Great – which is one of a significant group of Latin manuscripts held in the collection of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Associate Professor John Martyn has recently published a book on this exciting find. In this lecture, he will analyse this Gregorian manuscript in some detail – including his suggestions as to its most likely place and date of production, as well as an examination of the manuscript’s highly unusual capital letters. After graduating from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Martyn was appointed to the staff of the Classics Department of the University of Melbourne. A leading expert on the early Dark Ages in…

Sugar to Porcelain | The story of the famous Meissen Monkey Band (Die Affenkapelle) An illustrated lecture by Patricia Begg OAM Patricia Begg is an internationally renowned scholar and collector of porcelain and glass who has studied many of the large collections in England, Europe and North America first hand. She has curated a number of acclaimed exhibitions for major galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria, and is a regular presenter of lectures in ceramics, glass, and social history. Date: Tuesday 1 October, 11.00am Venue: Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Gate 13, Royal Parade Admission is free, but please book ahead as places are limited – Contact Brian Allison (03) 8344 8822 or ballison@unimelb.edu.au Website: http://library.unimelb.edu.au/events_calendar/events_calendar_entries/sugar_to_porcelain

Anne McComish Myths and Reality: Mosaics from the Vatican Studio, 1900-32 The Vatican Mosaic Studio has been producing mosaic artworks of the highest quality since 1727. Some of its finest works take pride of place in the decorative-arts collections of the world’s major galleries, while others are regularly offered for sale by the world’s leading auction houses. Naturally, the finest works are the most valuable, and it is frequently also assumed that the finest works are necessarily the oldest. However, are all of the works on display or offered for sale as old as their gallery labels or sales catalogues suggest? And how many of them are from the Vatican Mosaic Studio at all? Attribution and dating are among the most challenging tasks for any art historian but in the case of mosaics from the Vatican Mosaic Studio the task…